Professor VJ

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Style / Form

I never liked the idea of originality, and so my whole life I’ve always written by taking other texts, inhabiting them in some way so that I can do something with them.

Which suddenly brings me to Duchamp and what he said when lecturing on The Creative Act in Houston in 1957:

If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

Which I would then improvisationally remix via textual inhabitation as:

If we are all artist-mediums, we must then accept the fact that we are all in perpetual postproduction and that our aesthetic fitness relies on our ability to trigger novelty out of our unconscious creative potential. All of the decisions we make while performing our ongoing work of postproduction art rest with pure intuition and are envisioned as part of the creative act.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.

What does it take to become an upside-down, inside-out (wo[mb])man where, as Robert Creeley suggests, "Form is never more than an extension of content."

Creeley, whose spirit is conjured in the massive data blow-up that passes for a mini-retrospective of Jim Dine's work at Pace Wildenstein, wrote about form in a variety of sensuous measures. In "A Form of Women," he opens with:

I have come far enoughfrom where I was not beforeto have seen the thingslooking in at me from through the open door

and have walked tonightby myselfto see the moonlightand see it as trees

and shapes more fearfulbecause I fearedwhat I did not knowbut have wanted to know.